What’s Eating Reality
Set in an imagined future, What’s Eating Reality is a three course meal with a difference. This intimate show explores the journey our food has taken from seed to field to table, illuminating issues of food justice. Host Maya Chowdhry orchestrates the ritual of dining and uses media art to gently immerse the audience in a new reality, one in which the food they love may be in short supply.
“A new setting which overlaps with the everyday, and the connection of art and food as a creative experience.” audience, Nuffield Theatre
ArtCity Festival, 2019 
ArtCity Festival, 2019 
Lancaster Arts, 2018 
ArtCity Festival, 2019
Presented at The Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster, Dec 2018. Commissioned by Lancaster Arts through Diverse Actions. Supported by Eclipse through the Slate Play Pot 2018. Additional funding from Oppenheim-John Downes Memorial Trust. Toured in 2019 as part of Black Women’s Theatre Festival, Arnolfini, and ArtCity, Stoke on Trent, funded by an ACE project grant.
Fathoming Fungal Frequencies
This interactive sound experience seeks to uncover the existence of a shared language between human and fungi; giving a voice and making visible the mycelium network from which it fruits. By utilising interactive biodata sonification, which requires this inter-being collaboration, the piece hopes to connect human to more-than-human.
touching the mushroom to produce a generative soundscape 
SODA 2023 exhibition
The artwork was exhibited as part of ‘Beyond the Music Festival’ 2023. More information is available on the SODA website
Playable Plants
‘Playable Plants’ is a six-minute interactive sound experience. Set up as an installation, the audience interact with an orchid plant by touching its leaves and flowers, and through this interactivity generate a soundscape, using realtime biodata, responsive to their touch.
(Riley and Nguyen, 2019:1)
‘Huizinga (1949) noted that the word ‘play’ means both ‘to play a game’ and ‘to play a musical instrument’ across different languages’
SOIL VOICEMAILS AND OTHER TRANS-SPECIES CALLS
This digital poetry piece, commissioned for the ‘Crossed Lines’ project in collaboration with the Science Museum Group, explores trans-species calling: insects leaving ‘voicemail’ messages in the soil for other insects; humans creating computer-generated whistles to telephone dolphins; and the parallel of telephone-tapping to eavesdropping by túngara frogs.
Using animation and poetry, and mixing the sounds of endangered animals, insects and birds, the piece explores the resonance of telephone metaphors such as the exchange, the call-centre and the party-line in order to consider, in the light of the climate emergency, whether such trans-species calling might open up productive, ethical and sustainable ways of engaging with the other species with whom we share our planet.
The piece was developed as part of a collaboration with the Science Museum Group, 2020. Commissioned for Crossed Lines during the COVID-19 pandemic, Maya Chowdhry’s digital poem is inspired by part of a Rugby transatlantic telephone transmitted from 1927 which is held in the museum’s collections. Please visit the Science Museum Group for more information about the poem and the partnership.
WATER IS PRICELESS
An interactive installation examining the role of water in our lives, and the impending water scarcity that will affect parts of our planet in the near future. A hydroponic herb garden, made from upcycled water bottles, triggers animations which tell stories of water, what we have, how we use it, whilst a barcode scanner triggers a webcam that captures the audience’s image and refracts it into a mosaic of hundreds of images of water. Exhibited as part of PUSH at Contact Theatre, 2010.
Water is Priceless, Contact, 2010 
